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■which exhibited the highest skill of Jones and Wren, by noblehalls and chapels, by museums, by botanical gardens, and-by the only great public libraries which the kingdom thencontained. The state which Oxford especially displayed onsolemn occasions rivalled that of sovereign princes. Whenher Chancellor, the venerable Duke of Ormond, sate in hisembroidered mantle on his throne under the painted ceilingof the Sheldonian theatre, surrounded by hundreds of gra-duates robed according to their rank, while the noblestyouths of England were solemnly presented to him as can-didates for academical honours, he made an appearancescarcely less regal than that which his master made in theBanqueting House of Whitehall. At the Universities had beenformed the minds of almost all the eminent clergymen,lawyers, physicians, wits, poets, and orators of the land,and of a large proportion of the nobility and of the opulentgentry. It is also to be observed that the connection betweenthe scholar and the school did not terminate with his resi-dence. He often continued to be through life a member ofthe academical body, and to vote as such at all importantelections. He therefore regarded his old haunts by the Camand the Isis with even more than the affection which educatedmen ordinarily feel for the place of their education. Therewas no corner of England in which both Universities had notgrateful and zealou's sons. Any attack on the honour orinterests of either Cambridge or Oxford was certain to excitethe resentment of a powerful, active, and intelligent class scat-tered over every county from Northumberland to Cornwall.

The resident graduates, as a body, were perhaps notsuperior positively to the resident graduates of our time: butthey occupied a far higher position as compared with the restof the community. For Cambridge and Oxford were then theonly two provincial towns in the kingdom in which could befound a large number of men whose understandings had beenhighly cultivated. Even the capital felt great respect for theauthority of the Universities, not only on questions of divi-nity, of natural philosophy, and of classical antiquity, butalso on points on which capitals generally claim the right of

CHAP.

VIII.

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